Various data processing systems have been developed including storage systems, cellular telephone systems, and radio transmission systems. In such systems, data is transferred from a sender to a receiver via a medium. For example, in a storage system, data is sent from a sender (e.g., a write function) to a receiver (e.g., a read function) via a storage medium. As information is stored and transmitted in the form of digital data, errors are introduced that, if not corrected, can corrupt the data and render the information unusable. The effectiveness of any transfer is impacted by any losses in data caused by various factors.
Consequently, error checking systems have been developed to detect and correct errors of digital data. Error checking systems are used, for example, to process data retrieved from a magnetic hard disk drive (HDD). Each data sector of the disk drive can have different noise, jitter, and distortion characteristics or signal to noise ratios (SNR), which can be due, for example, to magnetic media defects, off-track writing, high fly height of magnetic write heads during a writing operation, large phase disturbance, and so forth. The throughput of a HDD is affected by the number of read errors in a data sector, based in part on the SNR, and by the speed at which the read channel can recover from a read error by correcting the errors.